Happy Trails?

Published April 13th, 2012

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Their issue isn't with the concept of the Archer Braid Trail, but with the location of the public trail running through their private community.The three home owners associations within Haile Plantation are against the county's plans, and are doing what they can to turn things around.

Wes White has lived in Haile Plantation for nine years, and says there's no need for the trail.

"We have over 15 miles of private bike trails that we maintain for our residents, to walk to ride," he said.

The county is building the public trail that will start in the city of Archer, and end at Veterans Park off of Tower Road.Two miles of it will run through Haile. Homeowners marked part of the trail with cones on Friday.

County planners want to provide access to Haile for everyone.

"Haile is a huge number of people, small commercial center in the middle, so it's important to connect that to the other parts of the community," said Jeffrey Hays, Alachua County Transportation Planning manager.

Three million "Federal Transportation" dollars will be used to build the first two phases of the ten-foot wide trail, which will eventually be extended to the University of Florida.

"Part of the design process is making sure that we're locating the trail in a place where we're going to have to take down as few trees as possible," he said.

The environment is just one item on White's list of concerns."What can we do? We can only protest and tell our county commissioners what we think and how we want our neighborhood to be and the assumption and presumption that we had when we bought-in here, that this was our neighborhood, and that the county would not arbitrarily come through here, just because they could, and do this," he said.

The public will have a chance to voice their opinion on the trail when it's discussed at the county commission meeting on April 24th.